Lieutenant Conrad said that he had told Jerry Ray during his August visit that neither he nor his brothers were suspects, nor had they ever been suspects in that crime. He told me explicitly that neither he nor any member of the Alton police department, nor, to the best of his knowledge, any employee or official of the Bank of Alton, had ever been questioned by The New York Times or any investigator of the HSCA. He said that he couldn’t imagine what the basis was for The Times’s claims or the committee’s allegations.
He advised me that there would be no need for Jerry Ray or any of his brothers to return to Alton.
I later acquired an FBI “airtel” of July 19, 1968, to the director from the Springfield SAC, reciting details of an interview conducted in Madison County Jail in Edwardsville, Illinois, with a suspect in the Alton robbery. The report of this interview states that the individual being questioned “meets physical description … in above bank robbery; has history of using automatic pistol similar to that used by op. sub. Number 1 and was employed part time for the cab company which had a stand directly across street from Bank … and invested heavily in cabs shortly after Bank robbery.”
In my view, there was no question that on August 1, 1968, the FBI was on the trail of the suspects for the Alton robbery, and that those suspects didn’t include the Ray brothers. Yet in August 1978 the HSCA, through Counsel Blakey, contacted Philip Heymann, Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, seeking the prosecution of John Ray for allegedly giving false testimony to the HSCA regarding the Alton bank robbery.
Before formally referring this matter to the Department of Justice, Mr. Blakey met with US Attorney Earl Silberg and a representative of the Criminal Division on May 24, 1978. Blakey admitted that the primary reason he wanted John Ray charged with perjury was to convince James Earl Ray to testify before the committee concerning his knowledge of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Blakey tried to persuade the Justice Department that John Ray had, in fact, committed perjury in denying his participation with his brothers in the robbery.
He also stated that “returning an indictment against John Ray in order to pressure his brother James Earl Ray into cooperating could and should be viewed as an abuse of process. It is one thing to use the criminal laws to pressure an individual into cooperating with the government. It is another thing to use the criminal laws against someone to pressure another individual into cooperating with the government. This is particularly true when the individuals involved are close family relatives such as brothers.”
During Jerry Ray’s appearance on November 30, HSCA Counsel Mark Speiser did indeed focus one aspect of his questioning on the Alton bank robbery. I informed Speiser that Jerry was not and had never been a suspect in that case and that this had been confirmed to me by the Alton authorities as late as the previous day. I also put on the record Jerry’s willingness to waive the statute of limitations and stand trial for that crime if any authority was willing to try him.
Jerry explicitly denied any participation in the robbery, pointing out that at the time of the Alton robbery he was working at the Sportsman’s Club in Northbrook, Illinois. His employment records would confirm that in the three years he worked there he never missed a day and that he frequently worked seven nights a week, making it impossible for him to have been in Alton at the time of the crime. Jerry’s factual responses fell on deaf ears.
Throughout the hearing, Flo and I frequently locked horns with the committee counsel. They continually attempted to tie Jerry and John to James during the time when James was a fugitive. Any facts to the contrary were ignored.
Though Flo and I believed as counsel that we had taken some of the bite out of the HSCA’s persistent attack on the facts, we expected the HSCA report to confirm the Committee’s predetermined conclusions.
We were right.
In January 1979, the House Select Committee published its final report on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It found no evidence or complicity on the part of the CIA, the FBI, or any other government agency in the assassination of Dr. King. Ray, it concluded, was a lone gunman. Raul did not exist, so Ray couldn’t have been a fall guy manipulated by others (even though racism was not the motive). The report itself was widely publicized, but the accompanying thirteen volumes had a very limited distribution. Only the interested few would learn that information buried in these documents frequently conflicts with conclusions in the report itself.
The volumes provide a detailed account of the FBI’s wide-ranging legal and illegal communist infiltration organization (COMINFIL) and counterintelligence programs and activities (COINTELPRO) conducted both before and after the assassination. They were designed to tie Dr. King and the SCLC to the influence of the Communist Party and to discredit Dr. King.
Back in 1957, when the SCLC was founded, FBI supervisor J. K. Kelly stated in a memo that the group was “a likely target for infiltration.” As the SCLC mounted an increasingly high-profile challenge to segregation and the denial of voting rights to blacks across the South, the Bureau began actively infiltrating meetings and conferences.
On October 23, 1962, Hoover sent a memo authorizing the Atlanta and New York field offices to conduct a general COMINFIL investigation of the SCLC and asked the New Orleans office to explore COMINFIL possibilities. COINTELPRO activities specifically targeting Dr. King began in late October 1962. The Bureau’s campaign embodied a number of felonies, according to a Justice Department report in 1977. This was noted in the HSCA report.
In December 1963, less than a month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Bureau officials met in Washington to explore ways of “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” The conference focused on how to “produce the best results without embarrassment to the Bureau.” Officials agreed that hidden microphones be placed in Dr. King’s hotel rooms as he traveled in an effort to pick up evidence of extramarital sexual activity that could be used to tarnish his reputation or even to blackmail him. Numerous hotels nationwide were bugged from late 1963 to the end of 1965.
Documents reveal that wiretaps of the SCLC Atlanta office ran from October 1963 to June 21 1966. Dr. King’s home was tapped from November 8, 1963, to April 1965 when he moved. In 1966, FBI Director Hoover, fearful of a congressional inquiry into electronic surveillance, ordered that the monitoring of Dr. King be discontinued. When Dr. King and the SCLC turned their attention to Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign, a request to Attorney General Ramsey Clark to approve renewed telephone surveillance was refused. We would learn that surveillance never ceased.
The Bureau also engaged in surreptitious activities and burglaries against Dr. King and the SCLC. The HSCA estimated twenty such events took place between 1959 and 1964. The Bureau would maintain that Dr. King was not officially a COINTELPRO target until late 1967 or early 1968. In fact, a massive campaign was under way from 1964 aimed at destroying him through dirty tricks and media manipulation.
The HSCA revealed FBI infiltration of the SCLC through a “black probe” operation. Former agent Arthur Murtagh, assigned to the Atlanta field office between 1967 and 1968, testified that the office’s primary informant was a member of the SCLC right up to the assassination, providing details of Dr. King’s itinerary and travel plans.
The HSCA firmly rejected the FBI’s contention that Ray was a racist and that was why he shot Dr. King. But it advanced a convoluted scenario that he carried out the killing to collect a bounty from two St. Louis racists, both dead by the time the committee reported.
The report accepted the fingerprint evidence of the dropped bundle but also noted that many unidentified prints were in the rooming house and on Ray’s white Mustang.
The Memphis City Engineers analysis of the fatal bullet’s trajectory could not conclude whether it came from the bathroom window of the rooming house attached to Jim’s Grill or the brush area behind the building. But the HSCA dismissed the possibility that the shot had been f
ired from the brush area. It concluded that the bullet had been fired from the bathroom, ignoring the statement from witnesses including Solomon Jones, Dr. King’s Memphis driver, that it came from the brush area, where he saw someone right after the shooting. Any person seen in the brush, the HSCA concluded, must have been a quick-responding Memphis Police Department (MPD) policeman already on the scene. It also concluded that no cutting back of the brush had taken place after the killing—and did not interview Reverend James Orange, who said he saw smoke “rise from bushes right by the fire station” seconds after the shot.
MPD undercover agent Marrell McCollough said that he was the mysterious figure kneeling over Dr. King after he was shot on the balcony. He had infiltrated the Invaders, a black group trying to address local needs in the city, supplying Lieutenant Eli Arkin, his MPD intelligence division control officer, with regular reports. He subsequently acted as an agent provocateur in activities as a result of which members of the Invaders were convicted and sentenced. He has never admitted that he was recalled to military service on June 11, 1967 and assigned to the MPD from the 111th Military Intelligence Group, as I learned years later.
Several conspiracy theories, some implicating the Mafia, were covered and dismissed in the HSCA report. It strengthened my growing conviction that Dr. King’s murder had not been solved. It also provided me with leads.
In early 1979, I traveled to Memphis to follow up on some issues touched on by the HSCA. John McFerren, a civil rights leader in 1968, eventually told me how he had heard Frank Liberto, president of the Liberto, Liberto, and Latch Produce Company in Memphis, shouting down the phone on the afternoon that Dr. King was killed. McFerren, who was at the back of the store, heard Liberto say, “I told you not to call me here. Shoot the son of bitch when he comes on the balcony.” Liberto told the caller he should collect his money—$5,000 was mentioned—from Liberto’s brother in New Orleans. McFerren heard Liberto had underworld connections—and was astonished when, an hour later, he learned of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
McFerren told Baxton Bryant, Executive Director of the Tennessee Council on Human Rights, who insisted that he tell the FBI. McFerren was reluctant until Bryant promised his name would be kept secret or he and his family would receive protection. In the early hours of April 8, he told his story to Frank Holloman, Director of the Memphis Police and Fire Departments; MPD Homicide Chief N. E. Zachary; and FBI agent O. B. Johnson at the Peabody Hotel. They taped McFerren’s account, had him sketch the scene, and promised to check it out thoroughly. Three days later, Bryant was told that the FBI believed that if McFerren had heard the call at all, it was not related to the killing. McFerren was left feeling like a criminal.
The HSCA had similarly dismissed allegations from Louisville police officer Clifton Baird that there was an attempt to assassinate Dr. King in 1965, emanating from named Louisville police officers collaborating with FBI agents. The claim, backed up with a tape recording he took, mentioned a $5,000 contract to kill Dr. King. It was another glaring instance of the HSCA’s failure to follow leads and solve the crime. Since Dr. King’s brother A. D. lived in Louisville, Dr. King visited that city from time to time. In a lengthy meeting in a darkened bar, Baird shared his evidence with me. He impressed me as an honest, courageous policeman.
Chapter 8
THE UNSCRIPTED TELEVISION TRIAL
How to reject a jury verdict
Is the task of a thoughtful people.
But, without knowledge, it has no credit,
The masses have a silent steeple.
I had to find another way to get the case heard and began fleshing out the bones of an unscripted TV trial—featuring real evidence, witnesses, a judge, and a counsel before an independent jury. It would be conducted strictly according to Tennessee law and criminal procedure. James liked the proposal from the outset, believing that if he could tell his story to an independent jury, he had a good chance of winning, though material evidence in the files of the federal government was sealed and unavailable to the defense.
In 1992, I signed a contract with Thames Television in London. Former US Attorney Hickman Ewing agreed to be the prosecutor; Marvin E. Frankel, a former federal district court judge, now practicing law in New York, the judge. I would lead the case for the defense. The jury was selected from a pool of US citizens initially secured by a consultant research group. Hickman and I agreed on twelve jurors and two alternates. As the trial approached, however, we were forced to move the jury from one hotel to another after our security people learned that the FBI had wired all of the rooms on the floor where the jury was staying.
In putting forward our case, we intended to go well beyond the actual murder and demonstrate the existence and extent of a cover-up.
The evidence we unearthed strengthened and tied together earlier findings. There could no longer be any doubt the prosecution’s chief witness was drunk and that Dr. King’s room at the Lorraine Motel was switched from one on a secluded ground-floor courtyard to a highly exposed one with a balcony.
Eyewitnesses Solomon Jones, Dr. King’s driver in Memphis; James Orange, SCLA field organizer; and journalist Earl Caldwell said the fatal shot was fired from the brush area, not the bathroom. Reporter Kay Black and James Orange both alleged the brush area had been cut and cleared back the morning after the shooting, possibly along with an inconveniently placed tree branch. I learned from Maynard Stiles, deputy director of the Memphis City Public Works Department in 1968, that the predawn cleanup request came from the Memphis Police Department early on the morning of April 5.
A number of suspicious events were confirmed. The only two black firemen were ordered (the night before the killing) not to report the next day to their posts at Fire Station No. 2 overlooking the Lorraine. Black detective Ed Redditt was removed from his surveillance post about an hour before the event. The MPD failed to form the usual security squad of black detectives for Dr. King. The emergency TACT support units were pulled back and TACT 10 was removed from the Lorraine to the fire station.
Evidence emerged that the CB hoax broadcast, which drew police attention to the northeastern side of the city, had been transmitted from downtown, near the scene of the killing. A former FBI agent confirmed harassment and surveillance of Dr. King by the Bureau, and MPD special services/intelligence bureau officer Jim Smith confirmed that Dr. King’s suite at the Rivermont where he usually stayed was under electronic surveillance by federal agents.
There were increasing indications that members of the Liberto family in Memphis and New Orleans were implicated in the killing. Jim’s Grill owner Loyd Jowers seemed increasingly likely to have played a role. Taxi driver James McCraw’s earlier claim that Jowers showed him a rifle under the counter in his Grill was corroborated by Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill who implicated Jowers, her former boss and lover, in the murder, admitting that after hearing what sounded like a shot she saw him run into the kitchen from the brush carrying a rifle. Her sister Bobbi told of having been driven to work by Jowers the next morning. He admitted finding a rifle out back. She also pointed to some sinister activity going on upstairs on the day of the killing and having been told by Jowers not to take food up to the recuperating Grace Walden, Charlie Stephens’s common-law wife. The death of Times magazine stringer and investigative reporter Bill Sartor in 1971 was confirmed to be murder. He was on the trail of the Marcello/Liberto organized-crime connection to Dr. King’s murder.
During the trial, the prosecution made great play of James’s “racism” and that he had supposedly stalked Dr. King. Great pieces of our evidence were excluded. Betty Spates and her sister were too terrified to testify, and John McFerren fled in fear. In my closing speech, I said the prosecution hadn’t introduced a shred of evidence of any motive. I went over the many holes in the prosecution’s flimsy case. These included the failure to match the evidence slug to the rifle at the scene, the fact that none of James’s prints were found in the rooming house, that the state’s chief witn
ess was falling-down drunk, the bathroom was empty just before the shot was fired, and there were three eyewitnesses to activity in the bushes and two eyewitnesses who saw James’s white Mustang being driven away from the rooming house minutes before the shooting.
I then catalogued strange events surrounding the case, including apparent tampering with the evidence slug, the cutting down of the tree and the bushes, the change of motel and room, the removal of security, and the standing down of black officers. Could James alone really have arranged these events?
The program aired on April 4, 1993—the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dr. King’s death. The jury found the defendant not guilty after deliberating for over seven hours.
The silence from media organizations was deafening. No major media had ever provided such a springboard to reopen a case—though, as never before, James’s innocence had been made clear.
Chapter 9
DOORS BEGIN TO OPEN
Slowly, ever so slowly, light and truth are one,
I began to feel the resulting pain
It seemed to me that they had won.
In this system Justice cannot gain,
Irrefutable—without doubt.
Denied, nevertheless, an ageless story
Lies, false images they daily flout,
To control, Assert false glory
Erected upon a sand-based Mount.
In the TV trial’s aftermath, I began to focus on Loyd Jowers. I wanted to find a way to put on the record the evidence that we had uncovered about his involvement. I thought it would be sufficient to prove James’s innocence. To secure his freedom, we also needed to learn as much as possible about what Jowers knew to get to the bottom of the conspiracy in Memphis.
Wayne Chastain, a reporter with the Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1968 and later an attorney in Memphis, knew Jowers’s lawyer, Lewis Garrison. The two frequently discussed the case. Garrison, a man of formidable conscience, told Chastain that his client had dropped hints that he knew much more about the events of April 4 than anyone else and seemed to be looking for a way to open up.
The Plot to Kill King Page 14
